As an entrepreneur, I’m learning about business and finances the hard way—through costly mistakes. Early on, my amazing mentor, Mark Wicken, advised me to have a reliable accountant and a reliable lawyer to support my growth. Others successful peers ahead concerning me often, “You need to learn the finances. Without it, you’ll never gain control of your business.”
While these tips sounded right, they require a consciousness that comes from experience. In my case trying as a software developer, my passion was building and I yet had to learn things the hard way, often leading to hardships. These challenges, though painful, are valuable lessons that I hope to share in a way that could be meaningful to others and help their growth.
Over the years, I developed a 7-daily CEO chore list to help me stay on track. However, until last year, I made the mistake of prioritizing project management over finance and marketing, leaving those areas for end-of-month and quarterly reviews.
In 2024, I reorganized my list and shifted my focus:
- Finance
- Sales
- Marketing
- Operations
- Team
- Clients
- Projects
This was a major shift. Instead of starting my day with projects, clients, and team-related tasks, I began prioritizing the harder parts first: finance, then marketing and sales. Although it sounds simple, this was a big adjustment. I had to trust that my teams were handling delegated tasks, while I focused on maintaining a healthy business by prioritizing finances.
This practice has been an interesting experiment. Each day, I write out my daily document with these seven items and time-box my day. However, I’ve felt overwhelmed and realized the need for an even more focused format and I’m starting to shift to a slightly different, weekly model of same 7-CEO Choirs.
I’m considering switching to a weekly system. For example, I could combine tasks like Sales and Finance on one day, Marketing and Operations on another, and dedicate separate days to Teams, Clients, and Projects. This would create a manageable 5- to 6-day cycle each week.